Chapel Hill's Tobacco Rogues

Both the stars have been lax about taking charge since the Tar Heels' first loss, to Princeton. The wins have come harder, and strange flaws have cropped up. For instance, the foul shooting dipped to an appalling 21 of 39 vs. Wake Forest and is only 64% for the season. This is particularly embarrassing since their own mothers probably could beat them at it. Mrs. Lewis once sank 35 in a row.

Part of the problem has been that the Tar Heels have been too passive against zone defenses. The zones were, of course, inevitable, because the Tar Heels are so tall—Lewis and Miller are, in fact, the smallest starters—and the L&M boys are such outstanding one-on-one players that it is almost impossible for a rival team to match up against them both. Miller is an especially exciting driver, a sure (if not fancy) dribbler who convoys the ball when on the move and then supplies both the strength and agility to muscle in for the three-point play.

Lewis moves well all over the court, on offense and defense, even when reluctant to commit himself to a shot. "I'm really enjoying this season," he says. "It's so different. You know, before this year, I never even went into a game when I didn't just assume that I would score 20 points. I expected that of myself. If I only got something like 14 points, I'd go crazy. I'd start worrying what was wrong. I'd even stay afterwards and practice. Now, listen, I've always wanted to win, but I always wanted to win and score points. I was always thinking about that. But I wanted to prove something this year. Look, I've scored. I have scored. I scored 27 points a game, and that's a lot of points. Now I want to show I can do everything else."

Despite his leanness, Lewis has always played very well underneath the basket; he learned his basketball on the playgrounds, where survival demands playing one-on-one, inside and out. For many summers, day and night, he would be at the Chevy Chase Center or at St. John's academy (where he made All-America in high school), playing pickup games with players like Dave Bing, Fred Hetzel, Ron Watts, John Thompson, Tom Hoover and John Austin. A great jumper (though he needs one step to get his spring), Lewis could always hold his own in the extracurricular playground dunking contests. On one occasion he tied the 6'10" Hoover, matching his best—a two-ball stuff, one right-handed, one left-handed on the same leap.

A sociology major, Lewis has roomed with Gauntlett through all four years at Carolina, which he says is a record. He may also hold another with Bettejane Burrows, with whom he has gone for six years. They will be married on July 29. In a glib moment when they were both 18 and had a mere three years of going steady behind them, Bob promised Bettejane an engagement ring on her 21st birthday. Sure enough, on her 21st birthday last September, he was there to give her the ring. Then Lewis went back to school and started giving the ball away, too. "Everything is just so great," he says, the blue pools glimmering.

Both Lewis and Miller will play pro ball, but Larry's future is otherwise more uncertain. A business major with a penchant for sports cars, he has no plans for marriage. Also, unlike Lewis, Miller did not grow up in a highly competitive environment. Instead, he, well, dominated the athletics of Catasauqua, a suburb north of Allentown on the Lehigh River. He was a pitcher until he quit that sport, a quarterback until his parents refused him permission to play football. He still has a fondness for football, though, and in an unusual fit of despondency last fall Larry called up his father, Julius Miller, a Mack Trucks assembler and town councilman, and told him he was going to shift to football. The moment quickly passed, however, to the relief of Catasauquans who have thrived on his basketball exploits for years. Fourteen busloads of townspeople showed up in Chapel Hill to see him play as a freshman and this year the town rounded up $4,000 worth of advertising to get the Tar Heel games broadcast by an Allen-town radio station.

Miller, like so many powerful men—strong and silent among strangers—can also be remarkably expressive when he does talk about himself and his background: about Catasauqua and his family, parents who had to quit high school because of the Depression, his sister who went to work, then decided to go to college and worked her way through. Of himself: "You know, when I was a kid, I was really on the wrong side of the fence. I was in a gang. We'd steal a few things, wreck a few things. We were picked up by the cops a lot of times. I was near real trouble. I was getting very good training to be a gangster. I don't know what would have happened, but one day my father—I admire that man more than anyone in the world—he gave me a real licking. I was about 11, I guess. And then, about that time, I found basketball. That helped, too." By his senior year in high school, Miller was not only an honor student but class president as well.

On campus, as indeed throughout the state, the L&M boys are honored. Carolina is that way; the state is studded with Yankees who came to play ball and stayed to live. Chapel Hill itself (with Duke just up the road in Durham) provides the state with an academic community that may be unsurpassed in the South. UNC draws students from every state, has become a favorite choice of the New England preppies and even offers that ultimate mark of the cosmopolitan campus, a peace demonstration. It is held every Wednesday at noon. UNC also enjoys a reputation for good parties, though many of the Carolina coeds are a bit inaccessible, since they spend their first two years at the W.C. The W.C. is over in Greensboro. It is the Woman's College. At Chapel Hill most any Friday night, you hear: "Hey, y'all, let's g'ovah to the W.C." Altogether, Chapel Hill is, as Thomas Wolfe once said, "a charming and unforgettable place with a good flavor of the wilderness." The scene is such that UNC recruiting efforts are considerably enhanced just by getting a prospect on campus.

Another advantage is Coach Smith, who is kidded by his assistants—John Lotz and Larry Brown—as having exactly the perfect personality for talking to mothers of prospects. It is obvious why, for Smith is such a sincere, studious-looking man that strangers often naturally assume that he is Dean Smith by title, rather than by given name. His players stand in awe of his technical basketball knowledge. Game plans are accepted with the assurance that Smith has just returned from obtaining them on Mount Sinai. Even when he is relaxing, his colleagues maintain, in a corner somewhere deep in his brain there is a relentless search going on for an alternate way to break a half-court 2-2-1 trap match-up zone press with a chaser...just in case. The Tar Heels worked a last-second full-court play against Wake Forest. "That probably came to Coach Smith at 10 o'clock at night last July 8," Graduate Assistant Coach Charlie Shaffer said. "I'm serious." Indeed, the one criticism usually heard about Smith's coaching is that it is too bookish and sometimes fails to take into account such intangibles as game tempo or team momentum.

Smith, his prairie twang still unaffected by the soft accents around him, played on the 1952 championship Kansas team and was brought to Chapel Hill as an assistant in 1958 by Coach Frank McGuire. He became head coach in 1961 when McGuire left and the school went on athletic probation for recruiting violations. Only this year has North Carolina firmly arrived at the top again, and the fans sense it with fervor. "Remember '57 in '67!" the signs say, in the hope that "seven" will roll national championship again.